Whether your search returns no results or hundreds of matches there are always ways to enhance your research.
Here are some important things to remember and techniques you can use to make your search results as useful as possible.
No results
- Just because you don’t find anything with your first search don’t assume there is nothing to find – try again using some of the tips below
Different spellings
- Names may be written in lots of different ways across all the different reports and company records, and various spellings may even be used even within one document.
- Searching for “my company”, “my company limited”, “my company ltd”, or even “my company ltd.” can all return different results.
- Similarly “John Smith”, “J.Smith”, “Mr John Smith” and “Mr J. Smith” might all be used to refer to one person and searching individual versions can all return different results.
- If you know EXACTLY what you are looking for be as precise as possible, but if you want to find all the possible matches a search like “my company” or “J Smith” are likely to give the best results to start you off
- Another option is to use OR in your search (it must be written in capitals) – “my company limited” OR “my company ltd” OR “my company ltd.” will find mentions of ANY of these terms
Too many results
- Sometimes a search can return too many results
- On the Investigative Reports page you can sort your search results by date – so you see the most recent reports first, or the oldest first
- You can also filter the results by publisher, so you just see the reports produced by the particular institution[s] you choose
- The sort and filter options are on the Investigative Reports tab of the search results page, above the displayed results.